Saturday, May 5, 2012

Rampart (SNES)

Rating: 3 out of 5

Pros: Somewhat unique, playing against a friend is great

Cons: Annoying sound, plain graphics; single-player is boring if you play very long at once

Rampart is a simple but fun little strategy/puzzle/tower defense game from Atari Games that was licensed by Electronic Arts and ported to the SNES
in 1992. It contains both a regular and a super mode for the
single-player game with multiple difficulty settings, as well as a
two-player mode where you can play against a friend.

The
gameplay consists of three phases; a build/repair phase, cannon placing
phase, and a battle phase. In the build phase, you take randomized Tetris-like
wall pieces and surround one of the castles on the land mass. During
the cannon placing phase, you can place cannons inside the walls you
have created, the number of cannons you get depends on how much damage
you've done, how much land mass you've boxed in, etc. When the battle
phase starts, you use those cannons to shoot at enemy ships in the water
to destroy them; once you've done so, you win the level and move on to
the next one.

While it's simple enough in premise, it's often
challenging in execution. For one thing, there are a few different types
of ships, and they shoot cannon balls at your walls to destroy them. If
you can't box in a castle during a build phase then you lose, and if
you don't box in enough area for your cannons then you can't fight back.
One type of ship just shoots and dies in a few hits, another shoots
flaming cannon balls that prevent you from rebuilding your walls in the
flaming spots for a few turns, and the other type drops off little
ground troops that march on your castles to destroy them.

Some
ships sit still and fire while you fire back, but many of them sail
around. This makes timing your shots and leading the enemy ships by just
the right amount the keys to victory. Also choosing which type of ship
is most dangerous to you and destroying them first. Even where to build,
as ground troops can't land on a wall; so if you place walls directly
on the shore where the troop ship is heading it will make things easier
on you.

The super game mode seems to have bigger land masses
to start with, along with some interesting levels thrown in to keep
things fresh. One level was some type of bonus level where I received
only giant W shaped pieces and was tasked with building walls around as
large of an area as possible within the time limit. Another level had me
shooting at a giant barge loaded with cannons instead of at individual
ships. It's a nice inclusion, though the extra land mass made it hard to
move the cursor across the map to where I wanted it when I wanted it
there. The super mode also includes a couple of extra weapons (a flaming
super cannon and an enemy-converting balloon) as well as some larger,
different shaped wall pieces.

In the two-player mode, you each
wall off part of a land mass that is separated by water and fire on
each other's castles instead of NPC ships. While the single-player mode
is amusing for a little while, it's this multiplayer mode where the game
shines. There's just nothing like taking over castles and blasting your
friends to smithereens with a pile of cannons.

The graphics are really plain and simple; in fact, there are many regular NES
games that look much better. Everything is just made of basic blocky
tiles with limited animation. It's enough to tell what's going on and
see where everything is on the map, but that's about the extent of the
quality. The whole game uses a top-down perspective with simple 2D
graphics, though in the super game mode you do get a sort of quasi-3D
map through the use of the Super Nintendo's Mode 7. This was common in SNES games to try and simulate a 3D-ish look, and was used in titles like Final Fantasy VI (III), F-Zero and 7th Saga.

The sound isn't much better, with some basic synthesized sound effects
and only a couple different pieces of background music that are both a
little high pitched and obnoxious. Rampart tries to sound good,
it really does, but it just falls short and leaves me muting the
television. There's some drum sounds and fanfare to build anticipation
or celebrate a win, but it's always just too obnoxious and repeated just
a little too often. Not "bad" per se, but I could have done without the
music entirely or at least toned it down a little bit so it was mellow
instead of grating.

It contains somewhere around 50 different
levels, though I've never managed to get anywhere near the end. After
winning a level, you're given a password that you can punch in at the
start of the game to bring you back to where you left off. The problem
is that since I play this game for 20 minutes here and 30 minutes there,
by time I pick it back up again a couple of months later I need to go
back through a couple of earlier to levels to get the hang of it again,
so I never end up gaining much ground.

Overall Rampart
is an average game, but it's somewhat unique and was among the
predecessors of the tower defense genre. It's somewhat fun to casually
play through a few levels, and a little more fun to pound away at with a
friend. It is a game that I do recommend, as I still play it
periodically and think others may enjoy it as well. On the other hand
it's a little expensive ($15+ or so online currently), and since Rampart was ported to a lot of different systems over the years you may be better off picking it up for another system (on the PlayStation Network, or as part of Midway Arcade Treasures for the Xbox or PSP).